Flip-flopping

I may feel deeply divided about a lot of things, but about this, I cannot equivocate: I love this monkey, sculpted out of 10,000 pairs of thongs for the Pixel Show in Sao Paulo. (More pictures here.)

Annie Vought's paper cuts

A few days ago, Neatorama featured a papercut piece by Annie Vought that immediately fascinated me -- it looked like a handwritten note, but it was actually a finely crafted cutout mimicking one of those relics of bygone days, middle school, passing pieces of college-ruled paper between classes to your best friends, scrawling impetuous thoughts in a pink sparkly hand. Vought discusses the series on her Web site:

Handwritten records are fragments of individual histories. In the penmanship, word choice, and spelling the author is often revealed in spite of him/herself. A letter is physical confirmation of who we were at the moment it was written, or all we have left of a person or a time.
I have been working with cut out correspondence for the past four years. I meticulously recreate notes and letters that I have found, written, or received by enlarging the documents onto a new piece of paper and intricately dissecting the negative spaces with an Exact-o knife.  The handwriting and the lines support the structure of the cut paper, keeping it strong and sculptural, despite its apparent fragility.

The piece above really resonated with me: in full, it reads "I was all of 25 at the time with out a clue to my future, hindsight doesn’t make the view any clearer except  where one begins to get a sketchy outline of life by discovering what it isn’t."

Well, I am now all of 27 (My birthday was yesterday! I accept belated gifts, baked goods, and well wishes!). I'm not sure what that means, and I'm as surprised as you are that I've made it this far. Here's to a new year of art, writing (Did I mention? More than 16,000 words for my little NaNoWriMo pet! Most of them are terrible, but I'm ahead of schedule!), and trying to discern a hazy picture of the way I want things to be.

Reviving Exquisite Corpse

Exquisite Corpse 56, by Josephine Meckseper, Laurie Anderson, Olaf Breuning, Nick Mauss. (Yes, that is Susan Boyle's grinning face.)

What, you don't know about this parlor game? Well, there's Wikipedia, or, from the gallery curating a selection of such pieces:

Over 200 important contemporary artists have come together to create collaborative drawings based on the 1920's surrealist parlor game "cadavre exquise". The project is meant to celebrate the theme of chance encounters, surprise and radical juxtaposition. Each artist adds to the composition, in sequence, without seeing the contribution of the previous person.

An exhibition of these curiosities is on at Gasser/Grunert until November 6.

Flavorwire also has a feature on the project, which is a very cool click.

Bright lights, smooshy city

Amazing plush sculpture of the Paris and New York skylines by French artist Emilie Faif. Not sure how it would be displayed, but if you, say, devoted one wall in your living room to skylines, a photograph of this fantasy would certainly be an interesting counterpoint.

Nano-ing my wrimo

No, that doesn't make sense. At all. Anyhow! I am valiantly attempting National Novel Writing Month again. I've made several abortive efforts to excrete 50,000 words in the span of November, and I've never actually made it to the finish line. Maybe this year will be different? Right now, it's 300 words about a girl staring at a blank page as she tries to think of something interesting to write for Nanowrimo. Ummm ... yes, this will not end well.

You light up my life

I need a new bedside lamp. How very cool would it be to read myself to sleep under the lambent glow of this number? It's a piece by Parisian artist Garbage (Gilles Eichenbaum), and there are many more repurposed pots where this one came from.

Thinking of inking

I'm terrified of a tattoo's permanence, but if I were inclined to ink myself up, it would be with something as geeky and/or word-nerdy as this. (This was posted by Todd, of Cleveland, Ohio, on Geeky Tattoos.)

Mona Tofu

Ju Duoqi reimagines famous works of art using veggies as her medium. On her process and the meaning she maps onto it:

I never leave the house, and when I do I rarely travel more than 15 kilometers. In a studio, with a knife, a box of toothpicks and some vegetables, I can make small sculptures and slap together big scenes, using a woman's most effortless and thrifty method of fantasizing about the larger world.

Inevitable

How we carve pumpkins in America: with a Glock. I don't fully approve, but a little gun-play might have spiced up our sedate Sunday pumpkin-carving affair.

Ebert doesn't need anyone else on his love train ...

... but I bought a first-class ticket nonetheless. Ten great films about horror! Which he claims is not a list, but is really kind of a list. "A curated selection"? I'm not sure. Anyhow, it's cool, because he highlights ten classics that are available free, in their entirety, on the Web. Here's Dracula, a Tod Browning production (and, bonus, Ebert's review of the film: for example, "It was the first talking picture based on Bram Stoker's novel, and somehow Count Dracula was more fearsome when you could hear him--not an inhuman monster, but a human one, whose painfully articulated sentences mocked the conventions of drawing room society").